jsulz

On December 9th, 2024 at 10:33pm my wife and I welcomed a new member of our family. Daphne Sulzdorf Kirsch came into this world announcing her presence with a scream.

A month later, the screams have more space between them, although her growing stamina and strength have conspired to make them louder and longer.

I don’t have an RSS reader anymore. When Google Reader shut down, I briefly tried to incorporate Feedly as my daily RSS driver, but it never stuck. Instead, I’ve turned to a compilation of Substack publications, independent blogs, and curated newsletters. My inbox has become my RSS reader, which it was never designed to be (that’s a conversation for another day).

In my inbox and in conversations with other friends of mine who are also internet denizens, I’m noticing a trend: It’s the end of the internet as we know it, and it has been for a while.

The short version of this article goes something like:

Improve your Lighthouse score with this one simple trick!

The longer version is only slightly more complex, and owes much of its simplicity to Netlify (for providing the simple Lighthouse integration and seamless PR-based workflows to test my changes) and Hugo (for making it easy to tinker around in theme templates).

After taking three or four months off from work, I’ve been looking around for my next landing spot after leaving Pantheon in November of 2023. That amount of time bought me a lot of clarity in how I want to practice the art of product management. It also gave me a lot of time to read! I’m still cranking through a lot of books, but one that I’ve been thinking about a lot is Ben Horowitz’s “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager” essay, especially as I’ve been interviewing again and it’s hard to avoid thinking about what makes me a good (and bad) product manager.

Along with learning about Hugo, I’m also digging through Netlify as a customer for the first time. This isn’t my first time examining their offering. As a product manager at Pantheon working on the Front End Sites product, they were a platform that was definitely on my radar.

In November 2023, I left Pantheon and, as I did so, took my blog off WordPress for good. Over the years, this content has lived on WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Pantheon. Now that I was venturing off WordPress platforms, it was both freeing and nerve-wracking. What was the port for this little boat? I knew I wanted to shift to a static site generator, and so Netlify and Vercel were top of mind. Ultimately, Netlify won out as I think their product caters to smaller hobbyist sites, like this one.

If you use a computer, you are a digital farmer. Maybe you are tending to your garden of emails. Perhaps you are pruning your digital catalog of photos. If you’re particularly advanced, you might be moving around old flower beds as you refactor a codebase.

Whatever it may be, you are now the proud manager of a digital landscape. It doesn’t matter if this farm produces for you (although for many people it’s their lifeblood); the tending must happen regardless lest the weeds run amuck. This the the great slog. Our systems, our digital gardens, they require constant vigilance and cleaning. You can put it off, but avoiding it entirely is not a winning strategy.

My gardening today consisted of a variety of small tasks around the blog.

The Decembers of my childhood were brutally cold. We lived in a converted general store and post office near a railroad in Waterloo, Montana. Our section of the Jefferson river valley was narrow. Bracketed by mountains to the west and east. In the winter, it was a wind tunnel.

Before our furnace was installed (sometime in my middle school era), we warmed our house with the three wood-burning stoves scattered about the house. I remember my mom frantically stoking the fires before we went to bed. No matter; our beds would be frozen against the walls every morning. Winter vacation during the school year was less a vacation and more an exercise in fighting off cabin fever while chopping wood.

After taking this site off WordPress, I’ve continued to chip away at a task list to make sure all of my desired bells and whistles are in place. This week, the task was setting up my categories to be more like what I’m used to.

My first tour of the WordPress admin was in 2009 (version 2.8 - Chet Baker). In my four years of freelancing after college, I dug through and created countless themes and plugins. After moving to Seattle, I ran product development at LexBlog, a digital publishing company where WordPress was front and center. In the past two years, I worked at Pantheon, a WebOps company supporting Drupal and WordPress website teams.

In sum, WordPress is a large part of my life.

Even now, as I make the decision to walk away from the WYSIWYG editor that is closest to my heart, I know it will remain a large part of my life. If not in my day-to-day, then in my memories.